The young ex-Irauna smiled and drew the sign of the cross.
"Bless you, my son."
The Islander colonel was shaking his head as he trotted on through the open space. Mary Mother of God, but sometimes I wonder if sending those missionaries to Alba isn't going to come back to haunt us, he thought to himself, and went up a rough pole ladder to the roof of the hospital. The lookout there pointed southward and a little west.
"They're moving there, Colonel," she said. "Fair number of 'em, but pretty scattered."
He trained his own binoculars and hissed. Yes, Ringapi for sure; moving by ones and threes and little groups, into the hills that made the southern wall of the valley and into the open forest above that. There they promptly disappeared into the shadowy bush, settling down behind trees or rocks. That was probably a hunting skill where they came from-mostly prairie and forest and wooded mountains, from the Intelligence reports-but useful here nonetheless. The first puff of smoke came as he watched. The crack of the rifle sounded a perceptible fraction of a second later; he couldn't see where the bullet landed. That was the signal for more; he scanned the mountainside, trying to count the guns as muzzle flashes winked at him out of the shadows. Now he could hear bullets going by, or going thock into the hard mud-brick walls of the hospital building, or making a peculiar crunching shrush into the sacks of barley.
"Lieutenant Hussey," he called, as he dropped down the ladder again.
"Sir?"
The boy was even more painfully young than his captain, thin and dark; O'Rourke decided that either he was getting old himself, or this one had lied about his age to enlist.
"Hussey, pull me out twelve Marines and a corporal-all of them good with a bayonet. Include- ' He named four from the escort that had ridden in with him. "Form them up by the wellhead over there. Take charge of them, and use 'em as a flying squad, to plug gaps. Oh, and marksmen on the south wall are to reply to those riflemen on the hill."
Barnes had come up while he was speaking, and raised an eyebrow. "They won't be able to see them, sir," she pointed out.
O'Rourke nodded. "But it will keep their heads down. They aren't what you'd call good shots-lousy, I'll wager, the lot of them-but there are a lot of them."
"And we're what you might call a large target," Barnes said grimly, tapping her fingers on her holstered pistol.
As if on cue, one of the Marines on the north-facing wall dropped back and cried out, clutching at his leg, and yelling: "Corpsman, corpsman!"
The stretcher-bearers trotted over and lifted him onto the stretcher, trotting off to the hospital building, ignoring the occasional bullet kicking up a pock of dust in the open space they had to cross.
"That we are, macushla," O'Rourke agreed, his voice equally ironic. He pointed westward, past the hospital building. "Droopy Gray Whiskers up there, his dispositions make sense now. He'll send his men in like this"-he clenched his fist, put the first two fingers out in a fork, and pushed them forward- "at the hospital; it's where we're weakest because the firing line is narrow, and the sun'll be directly in our eyes. Then the most of them will come around the north side, along the building's wall, and then the breastwork."
"Not the south at the same time?"
"Not in force; they'd get in the way of those gentlemen up there." He jerked a thumb at the snipers on the hillside above them. "If we last until dark, then yes."
"Pray for dark, then-except that then the rest will be able to get closer."
She looked southward, frowning slightly; he noticed how feathery-fine her eyebrows were, above the dark-blue eyes. "I'll take every second rifle off that wall when the attack comes in."
He nodded. "Until then, they're safer there. But a last thing… put your eye to one of those rifles up there, and tell me what you see."
Barnes did; her eyes went a little wider, and she looked down at her watch. "That's a damned fast rate of fire, if they're using the sort of muzzle-loading abortion Walker was supposed to be handing out. Westley-Richards model at least," she went on, naming the first flintlock breechloader Seahaven had turned out for the Republic's armed forces. "Or even Werders."
"I doubt Walker is handing out the latter; he doesn't have enough of the copies he's made to arm his own forces yet. So either he's giving the savages there first-rate… or at least second-rate… rifles, or they captured a good many recently."
Their eyes went down the road to Troy, until a voice called them back: "Here they come, the whole fucking lot of them!"
The flagship of the Islander fleet shipped a surge of black water across her starboard bow, shrugged it off, raised her long bowsprit into the storm.
"I don't like the look of this," Marian Alston-Kurlelo said, legs flexing to keep her upright as the stern of the ship went through its cycle of pitch… roll… rise… heel… fall.
"No, ma'am," Commander Jenkins said, voice pitched loud to carry through the rumble and hiss of the sea, the creak and groan of timbers working with the rushing speed of the ship. "Dirty weather, and a filthy night."
She was standing on the quarterdeck of the Chamberlain, not far from the ship's newly promoted captain. He had sailed on her as Alston's XO while the commodore was acting as captain-aboard as well as C-in-C, and was still a little nervous about the three broad gold stripes on the cuffs and epaulets of his blue jacket that marked his promotion to commander and captain of the frigate.
I have no intention of joggling your elbow, she thought but did not say. The OOD probably felt just as nervous having the godlike authority of a captain and commander on the same quarterdeck on her usually lonely vigil; it was just after two bells on the midwatch, one in the morning to civilians.
"I think it's coming on to a really stiff blow," she said thoughtfully, instead.
The sky was pitch-black and the sea reflected it, with the wind making out of the west and a nasty cross-chop, a chaotic surface of waves crashing into each other in bursts of off-white foam. Sheets of cold rain blew in with the wind mingled with spindrift whipped off the surface of the waves, making her want to hunch her right shoulder; she did nothing of the kind, of course, standing erect with her hands clasped behind her, letting the wind slap the oilskins and sou'wester against her. The only light was from the big stern-lanterns and what leaked from the portholes of the deckhouse behind her, and the riding lights at the mastheads; she could see others spaced out across the heaving waters to her west, the rest of the Republic's southbound fleet. There were four hands on the benchlike platforms on either side of the frigate's double wheels, wrestling with the tension that flowed up through the rudder cables and drum to the wooden spokes. Plenty of it, with this cross-sea and the heavy pitch it imposed.
They're probably thinking about their reliefs and a hammock, Alston mused. Although the crew's hammocks on the gun deck would be swaying like branches in a gale, and it would get worse-they'd have to fasten the restraining straps across themselves. I should go below, get some rest. If only we'd been able to get the politics finished and get away earlier in the season!
If there hadn't been so much riding on this fleet-if she'd been commanding a single ship, say-she might well have been enjoying herself. This was real sailing. The burden of worry made that impossible.
"There are times I badly miss satellite weather pictures," she said.
"Ma'am."
Jenkins nodded for politeness' sake; he was barely thirty, and they were a fading memory of the CNN National Forecast to him. They'd been an essential tool of the sailor's life to her, for better than a decade. You developed a sixth sense about weather, if you studied it carefully all your life, but it just wasn't the same as that godlike eye in the sky.